“One Flew East, One Flew West, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.”With their name taken from this opening to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, One Flew East have been gigging like crazy, showing the lovely people of Sydney what shiny pop rock should sound like.

“Yeah we took a few months off to do some recording, which never happened,” singer and keyboard player Rich tells me. “We spent all of our time really going back through our songs and re-working them and tightening them up, and working on our live show.”

“You see a lot of bands today just getting up and chugging out a set you know, it doesn’t feel like a performance. All the bands that we love have something about them when you see it live, it’s an experience, there is something more than the music there and that’s what we’ve been trying to do.”

Judging by the searingly warm reception they received at Sosueme at Q. Bar on the 15th of August they’ve done just that. We got them to treat us to a bit of an impromptu jam on our office instruments including a keyboard, djembe an out-of-tune five stringed guitar and a slit drum. Regardless of the poor acoustics and the near third world quality of the instruments it actually sounded ok.

The song was called Swiss Guard and it is an example of Rich’s new direction in songwriting. “We’ve got this song called Swiss Guard that’s basically a story about a Swiss Guard in the Vatican. I’ve started writing songs with more of that kind of a story to them because every story has been told, it’s about telling the stories in an interesting way.”

The band have had a bit of an almost rivalry with These New Puritans, as the band mentioned them in an interview criticising their name. “It’s such bullshit, there whole gimmick is that they claim to be a band that aren’t influenced by anyone. So they came out and said you know ‘you get bands like One Flew East who take a One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest quote and pass it off for their own.’ We love that they mentioned us, but for fuck’s sake, no influences? You got up this morning and took a piss, that’s an influence, everything is an influence.”

Fucking ay to that. Saying you have no influences is just like Wolfmother saying they don’t listen to Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath. FUCKING BULLSHIT!